Old-school games found as easter eggs in aging lab equipment

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Easter eggs can be found pretty much everywhere, these days. The small secrets, in-jokes, and references are now layered into virtually every facet of life. For instance, your cell phone almost certainly has some hidden messages embedded in its OS, or in the personality of its assistant software. Easter eggs are found in film from Hollywood blockbusters to YouTube videos, in video games, even in packaging and promotional material. Google has made it something of a company tradition to embed little treats into its main search page, including a fully functioning game of PacMan.

Still a new easter egg recently brought to light via Reddit, comes from a truly unique place: an old piece of lab equipment called an oscilloscope. This voltage reading device usually prints out sin curves and basic numerical results — but with a bit of creative button-mashing you can find something much more interesting: a full game of Tetris!

If you’re wondering, it’s a fairly simple series of keystrokes. Simply press PRINT, then the 2nd and 3rd monitor keys at once — voila! One can only imagine the joy that accompanied this discovery, so long as there wasn’t any key work ongoing at the time. There’s no telling how many people have discovered this game over the years, though thanks to social media IAmAHiggsBoson gets a disproportionate amount of credit for the discovery.

Interestingly, other Reddit users who tried the same button combo on different models found different games! One found a working version of Asteroids, while another found a seemingly original game called Bugs that plays identically to Centipede. We will never know how many hours of labour HP paid out to engineers while they created these hidden treasures (presumably without consent from the higher-ups).

It’s debatable whether easter eggs truly exist for the user, or for the creator. After all, there’s nothing better than stumbling onto a secret and feeling that moment of long-distance kinship with the person who put it there; though you might be separated by oceans, language barriers, and decades of time, you and some nameless developer are sharing in a little laugh. On the other hand, if a tree falls in the forest… Now that the secret has gained a bit of traction on social media, is it still an easter egg, or is it now a feature of the device?

These and other imponderables may well have to wait for the day when our great thinkers don’t have distractions programmed right into their most basic tools.